I have reposted another request-for-help at the CDShell forum:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=12249

If you read some of the recent messages, it seems to be an issue that a number of people have encountered. So let's see if we can help them nail down and resolve this issue.

Booting from a Smart Boot Manager floppy, I've been able to work around Boot Error failures with UBCD 3.3. This might apply to people experiencing 808xxxxx or other boot errors.

I've yet to see any progress on this issue at the CDShell forum. Until / unless this problem is solved, it's quick and painless to download what's needed to create a Smart Boot Manager floppy:

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/download.html

My own boot error 81400219 is due to an old BIOS, which -can- boot from MS-DOS-bootable CDs, because those CDs emulate a floppy disk. My BIOS fails to boot from from ISOLINUX (syslinux) or from CD Shell, as both of these boot loaders lack floppy-emulation mode.

I've already posted a similar message in the Support & Troubleshooting forum here, where it's yet to receive any replies. Can anyone explain the difference between that forum and this one?

I love this UBCD and have spent hours adding my own goodies to it. However, while this works great on all computers at work, Dell GX200, GX270, GX260, Hp e-Vectra's and my own home computers, it doesn't work on the new Dell GX280.

It will boot fine and get to the main menu. Then once an option is chosen, it goes to a blank screen with the cursor hanging at the top. That's it and its locked up. Doesn't matter which options I choose. Same thing happens, whether I choose options I created or one's from the original build.

I have mixed results on the Dell D610 laptop. Some options will work, but calling for Gdisk through one of my menu's hangs as well. This same option works fine on all the other pc's.

I do know the GX280's have SATA drives so I don't know if that affects anything. I also know I can get my self made programs to run if I put them on their own bootable cdrom., ie not placing them into the UBCD.

But I like the convenience of an all-in-one cdrom.

I hope this helps provide more information on this problem. It obviously seems the new technology on these new pc's/laptops are causing the problem. I think I read a new version of pcshell is supposed to help?

Good news and Bad news: If you saw my earlier post, you saw the problems I was having getting UBCD 3.3 to boot past the menus.

Last night I took my custom menus and images and re-downloaded UBCD 3.2 {not easy to find anymore} and placed them on the new build. Created a new ISO and just now tried it at work on my GX280 {that didn't work with the UBCD 3.3 version}. Bingo!

Everything is working now. Not sure what is the difference technically between 3.3 and 3.2 of UBCD, but using the old version works on these newer computers.

Bad news is of course we don't have all the updates on the prior version. I guess one could try to figure them out and copy them over to the existing version?

Still a great work and I am sure with more information like this, we can figure it out.

Another follow up to my previous post. Menu items using the F11 key don't bring up anything. This is true on items I added or existing items. Must be another issue with blending the two versions together.

From experience, F11 and F12 don't work. Try to stick to F1-F10.

The major difference between UBCD 3.2 and 3.3 is the use of the new CDShell (V2.0.11 vs. V2.0.16).

Looks like CDShell V2.0.16 has boot problems on certain machines. The obvious solution would be to revert to CDShell V2.0.11, but we could also help the CDShell authors iron out the problems if we persist with CDShell V2.0.16.

Thanks for responding. I did a few days ago use number keys in addition to the F1-10 keys and the did indeed work better. I ended up reverting back to 3.2 and modifying it.

So is it possible to take the 3.3 components and revert back to the earlier version of cdshell? I don't suppose its a simple as just copying over the earlier version on top of the old? Wishful thinking right.

Most of it should work, but grub.iso and offline.iso won't work, so you
need to create the floppy equivalent for these apps.

You also need to modify "bcdw boot" to "bcdw" for all the .scn files.

This morning I also saw the same error booting UBCD 3.3:

------------------------------------------------
Error booting from CD/DVD drive
Press any key to reboot....


[16 square blocks followed by lots of dots] 80800279
------------------------------------------------

The machine is an older PC that was built with off-the-shelf components, namely:
* AOpen AXBC motherboard.
* 900 MHz Celeron Pentium 3 CPU.
* Matshita CR-586 (basically a standard Panasonic CD-ROM drive).

The machine is stable, has been running fine for over 5 years (it's my previous desktop machine), and passes memtest without any problems. The machine boots the windows 2000 install CD, as well as the debian woody Linux install CDs, and also an old memtest bootable CD.

This same UBCD boots and runs fine on my new desktop machine, so I think the CD itself is fine.

Also, the same boot error occurs whether there is a hard disk connected to the machine or not.

Hope this info helps in some way to track down and resolve the problem.

You might want to check out these two threads in the forum:

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=156
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=125

The bottom line is this appears to be a problem with the latest version of CDShell, so we will have to wait for them to be fixed in a later release.

Hello Group;

I’ve searched the forum for a similar problem without success and this topic looked close. I downloaded version 3.3 Basic and it booted up to the menu screen. But when I tried to use an antivirus utility, it started and then crashes. Then I downloaded version 3.3 Basic from two other sites with same results. Have tried version 3.3 using both CD-R and CD-RW (burned with Nero 6) with same results on both.

I tried the new version on a PC that boots/runs version 3.2 Basic fine.

As suggested, tried launching memtest86 and memtest86+ and both worked with version 3.3.

Here are results I had after running 5 antivirus packages:

1. FPROT message: “Batchfile ‘T:\DOS APPS\FPROT\STARTUP.BAT’ not found” So I went to T:\DOS APPS\FPROT and STARTUP.BAT was not listed in directory. The directory listing had 3 directories with corrupted filenames, 3 corrupted filenames and 7 good filenames.

2. AVG Free Ed message: “AVG 7.0/DOS Copywrite GRISOFT sro 2003 Cannot init CORE (corrupted AVI7.AVG?)” So I went to T:\DOS APPS\AVG and “CORE” was not listed in directory. The directory listing had 1 directory with a corrupted filename, 5 corrupted filenames and 3 good filenames.

3. McAfee AV message: “Missing or invalid T:\DOS APPS\MCAFEE\MESSAGES.DAT” So I went to T:\DOS APPS\MCAFEE and “MESSAGES.DAT” was not listed in directory. The directory listing had 7 good filenames.

4. AntiVir Personal Ed message: “Scan results Dirs=1, Files=4, Warnings=2 Error: could not open file for read access” (One of the files listed by AntiVir had a corrupted name)

5. AVAST! Software loaded to a blue screen with a header across top. At the bottom of screen was message: “Error while working with data file LGUARD.VPS.” The program was then locked up.

In Windows XP, none of the files on the CD are corrupted or missing.

Dell Dimension 4600i , Intel P4 3.0 Ghz
BIOS version A10 (BIOS does not have virus protection.)

Hope these clues help someone to find the problem as UBCD is super.

Larry